


and i am home

by LtTanyaBoone



Category: X Company (TV)
Genre: Character Study, Gen, Post-War
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-01-02
Updated: 2017-01-02
Packaged: 2018-09-14 02:40:50
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,054
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9154738
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/LtTanyaBoone/pseuds/LtTanyaBoone
Summary: Aurora returns home. (post-war sort of character study)





	

**Author's Note:**

> Translations for the German phrases can be found at the end.

The war is over.

It’s something she still cannot believe, cannot fathom. It feels so surreal. Her entire life, for the past few years, has been attempt of attempt of attempt at survival behind enemy lines. Living in Nazi occupied France, as a Jewish woman. Living behind enemies lines as an Allied agent.

Yet the newspapers and the broadcasts keep repeating it, over and over again.  Berlin has fallen. The Führer is dead. Deutschland hat kapituliert. And she still cannot believe it. Can’t believe it when Sinclair calls them back, cannot believe it when she is on the plane, cannot believe it at Camp X, cannot believe it as she is sitting in a room with Sinclair for her debriefing.

They thought, so many times, that this was going to be the end. But it never was. The German hydra kept getting up again and again, kept pushing out more men, kept sending more agents and weapons and bombers.

Canada is so quiet. It is strange and foreign, even though it is her home. Used to be her home. Aurora inclined her head and closes her eyes at the thought. Lake Ontario is beautiful, the water’s surface smooth, rippling in a soft breeze. There are no airplane noises, no gunfire in the background. No trace of the smell of gunpowder or fire or blood.

Harry is the first to leave camp. His debriefing feels rushed to her. Then again, hers is longest because she was the sergeant of the team. Well, almost the longest. She knows Alfred spends more hours cooped up with another agent, relaying details of missions she has long forgotten. Blissfully empty blackness were painful details should be residing in her brain. Sometimes, she is grateful for the moments when her psyche tries to protect itself. Other times she curses and wants to scream, because she is the goddamn sergeant and she should be the one bearing all this, not Alfred.

Neil leaves before she does, too. He doesn’t tell her where he goes, but she can guess. And she’s pretty sure he will find Krystina already there. It is strange, how one man can have had such different but similar impacts on two people to absolutely different from each other. But then again, he was Tom, and if there is one person who ever could have pulled of such a thing, it had to have been him.

The train ride is long and her head keeps bumping against the window as she stares, unseeing, at the landscape flying past.

She didn’t write. Couldn’t, after a while. Not because the camp forbade it. She would have had to send her communication through them, anyway, they would have censored what would have been needed to. No, after a while, it just felt so... false. Like everything in her life. She hadn’t been Aurora in a long time, had been so far removed from the person she had been, her life had been one lie after another and she just couldn’t make herself add even more, especially not on paper. So she’d stopped writing. She knows the camp probably send generic postcards every once in a while, someone forging her handwriting. They had a lot of experts on hand and they needed to get the training in, anyway. And the camp needed her parents to keep quiet and still and stop them from wondering.

Her father is a pacifist. The thought had caused some hysterical laughter in the past, on her part. What her father would have said if he had known what his precious little girl was doing, exactly, half a world away from home. He’d never picked up a gun in his life, yet he somehow managed to raise a girl that shot a Nazi right between the eyes without flinching. We’re not going to mention the vomit that came up about a second afterwards and splattered her shoes.

More than anyone else, she knows that her father believed that weapons would not change anything. That words were the things that held the true power. He was right, in a way. She knows what German propaganda did, how efficient, how effective it was. Part of that war that has taken so much from everyone has been fought on paper and on typewriters and with meticulous penmanship. And she thinks that the crimes those words permitted made them the more effective weapons than guns and knives in any case.

He doesn’t say anything when she first shows up, looking like something the cat dragged in. Her mother screams and yells and hugs her so tightly that she cannot breathe, and Aurora closes her eyes and inhales her mother’s smell, the scent of her perfume and the laundry soap and the dinner she’s been working on. It used to smell like home to her. Now it itches in her nose and makes her pull a face at how distant and removed she feels from all of this.

He hugs her, silently. Her father is tall, almost a head taller than her. He’s thin, but strong and she allows her face to be burried against his shoulder. Allows herself to be sheltered, for a moment, allows her shoulders to relax briefly before she pulls herself up again and gives him a silent smile, a grimace, really, that does nothing to assure him she is fine.

He finds her on the back porch after dinner. She watches a chicken slowly make its way through the grass in search of food, soft clucking carrying over to where she is sitting. The bottle of bourbon sitting on the steps next to her scrapes against the wood when her father pushes it out of her reach to sit down next to her.

He hasn’t said much since she walked into the house. Part of her is wondering if he knows. If he can sense what she has done, can somehow see it written on her face in clear print. If the bloodsplatter of the people she killed left behind enough to mark her to be a ruthless killer.

She knew. Before he did, before he even suspected. She knew what happened to their family. What happened to Omi, to his own mother. What happened to his little niece. And she didn’t have the decency to tell him. Even if the camp had told her not to, she should have done it. But she hadn’t even considered it, because she wouldn’t have been able to face it. Wouldn’t have been able to answer his questions, and she wouldn’t have been able to be the one to tell him that his own people murdered his parents.

“Du hast mir gefehlt.”

His voice is soft. So soft when he finally speaks. People always think German is a gruff, harsh language. But she cannot remember a single time her father’s voice has ever been anything else but kind and soft and tinged with so many things left unsaid.

Tu nous manques, her mother had written her, once. Different words, the same meaning. Well, almost. Her mother has written of them, as parents. Her father now speaks of himself, as a parent, perhaps, but more so of himself as a person.

“Papa,” she starts and clamps her hand over her mouth because she almost tells him. Tells him everything, every horrible crime she has comitted in the past years. She’s murdered his little daughter, murdered her in her sleep when she went to bed for the first time at Camp X, as a fresh recruit. She’s been a seductress, an adulterer, a forger, a liar and a murderer. Everything he never wanted her to be. He wanted her to be a writer, a healer, and she took what he had given her, the gift of language and the knowledge of words and their power, and she’d twisted it, twisted it into a horrible weapon used to destroy instead of build, to tear down instead of lift up.

She feels his hand on her shoulder, his normally soft touch strong, almost painful as he grips her and pulls her in. Pulls her against him with a desperation and she lets out a loud sob of anguish as he cradles her head, holds her tightly pressed against his side as she cries and sobs and screams in pain. There is so much of it she feels like she is drowning in it. Years of it, the waves crashing over her head and pulling her under.

“Ich bin so froh,” he whispers into her ear and she can feel the wetness of his own tears against her cheek when she has come around enough to stop the loud sobs and has finally quietened down to whimpers. “So, so froh, dass du noch am Leben bist,” he tells her and she feels him shudder, feels goosebumps break out on her own skin. He has lost so much that she cannot even begin to understand, and she doesn’t think he understands enough just how close he came to losing her, too. Then again, maybe he does. Understand, that is. Or perhaps he has, lost her. Because there is no going back to the person she was before all this. The young, naive little Jewish girl who thought the world was hers for the taking. Those days have long gone and she doesn’t think she could fake being that person now, even with her training.

“I am so, so sorry,” she breathes, and her father shushes her. Presses his hand over her mouth gently and makes a shushing sound.

“Kein Wort,” he tells her, tears brimming in his eyes when she looks at him. “Meine Tochter ist wieder da. Meine Aurora ist nach Hause gekommen. Das ist alles, was zählt. Hörst du mich? Das ist alles, was zählt,” he insists, staring into her eyes with knowledge shining in his green ones. She sniffles and draws a shuddering breath before she closes her eyes and nods, silently. Only then does he remove his hand from her lips, a sad smile on his own.

“Komm,” he tells her and stands, holding his hand out for her to take. She watches him, looks up at him like she used to, years, decades ago. Like he is made of wonderment and stardust and everything magical in the world. Like he can fix everything. And she so desperately wants to believe that, now. That her father is a wizard, a sorcerer, who can fix anything and anyone, if they need him to.

“Die Hühner warten,” he adds when she doesn’t move. It’s such a ridiculous thing to say. Who cares about the goddamn chickens?

She finds she does. Takes his hand and lets him pull her up. As a child, he used to do it so forcefully that it threw her into the air for a moment. Even now, she can feel her feet briefly leave the ground, surprised by his strength. By his magic.

She keeps holding his hand, tightly, as they make their way across the yard, to where the chicken coop is. It used to be her responsibility, as a child, to feed them and provide them with water, and to check if they’d laid any eggs in the morning. Her father helps her, now, amongst all the clucking. It’s a piece of foreign normalcy, so strange and different from anything she has experience in the past few years. It makes her heart ache with a longing for the time when things were as simple as this. When this was her life, alongside schoolwork and friends.

Her father procures an egg from amidst the hay and holds it out to her with a smile. She takes it and frowns at the brown shell.

“Do you think Maman would make latkes tonight?” she finds herself asking. Her father frowns at her and she gives a soft shrug. “It has been so long...” she starts and trails off and his features soften.

“Wenn wir genug Kartoffeln haben, mit Sicherheit. Ansonsten musst du nochmal einkaufen gehen,” he tells her with a wink. And she doesn’t know what it is, if it’s his tone, or the words, or the wink, but something about it makes her heart feel just a tiny bit lighter. And in the chicken coop on her parents’ property, Aurora smiles.

_fin._

**Author's Note:**

> Deutschland hat kapituliert. - Germany has surrendered.  
> Du hast mir gefehlt. - I missed you. (further note on this at the bottom)  
> Ich bin so froh. - I'm so glad. (or happy)  
> So, so froh, dass du noch am Leben bist.- So, so glad, that you are still alive.  
> Kein Wort - Not a word.  
> Meine Tochter ist wieder da. Meine Aurora ist nach Hause gekommen. Das ist alles, was zählt. Hörst du mich? Das ist alles, was zählt. - My daughter is back. My Aurora has come home. That is all that matters. Do you hear me? That is all that matters.  
> Komm. - Come.  
> Die Hühner warten. - The chicken are waiting.  
> Wenn wir genug Kartoffeln haben, mit Sicherheit. Ansonsten musst du nochmal einkaufen gehen. - If we have enough potatoes, sure. Otherwise you will just have to go out again to buy some.
> 
>  
> 
>  
> 
> _A note on "Du hast mir gefehlt.": German has two ways of expressing the "I missed you" sentiment. One is literally saying "I missed you", which is "Ich habe dich vermisst". The other, the one Aurora's father uses, actually translates to something like "You were missing from me."_


End file.
